Professor Avedis Donabedian (1919-2000)

Born into an Armenian family, he was born in Beirut in 1919 and grew up near Jerusalem. In 1954 he moved to Boston, and the following year he graduated from Harvard University in Public Health. He worked for 28 years in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health.


His contribution to the systematization of knowledge within the health sciences, especially focused on improving healthcare quality, has been globally recognized and has earned multiple awards. He developed the structure, process, and outcome approach, which became the foundation for measuring and improving the quality of healthcare. These contributions are collected in 'Evaluation of the Quality of Medical Care' (1966), and he worked to define all aspects of quality in health systems and the proposed models for measurement, found in over 100 articles and 11 books.


He was also a poet and passionate about literature, capable of reading fluently in six different languages. In fact, he wrote poetry all his life, and near his death, he wrote that it was in his poetry where one could best appreciate who he truly was.


Ultimately, he was an extraordinary person who, with his generosity, enriched the lives of those who knew him.


Profesor Donabedian